Review: Portland2010 at Disjecta

Sean Healy. Muscle Car Memory/Carcinoma 2010. detail.

The Portland2010 Biennial opened last Saturday night at two of its eight venues, Rocksbox Fine Art and Disjecta. The exhibition by Ditch Projects at Rocksbox, I’ll talk about in another post. But the work at Disjecta was very familiar to followers of the arts in Portland. David Corbett recently had work in a group show at Half/Dozen Gallery, Crystal Schenk’s stained glass shopping cart, “Have and Have Not,” was at the PNCA faculty show, Bruce Conkle and Marne Lucas’ installation, “Warlord Sun King,” had been previously installed at the Marylhurst Art Gym while Crystal Schenk and Shelby Davis’ drywall semi, “West Coast Turnaround,” was installed at Milepost 5 albeit with a few yards fewer of trailer.

It was fantastic seeing Sean Healy’s installation yesterday with fewer viewers in the house and with the benefit of knowing its title, “Muscle Car Memory/Carcinoma.” The four candy-colored resin “concrete blocks” are the shadow of that muscle car that finally made if off the blocks in the suburban driveway while the accompanying wall pieces constructed of what look like the paper end of hundreds of cigarettes on end are missing only the grease marks of fingerprints as they stand to mark the mechanic’s time spent under the hood. This is the second time today I’ll note in writing the minimalist overtones (in particular, West Coast minimalism as influenced by car culture) of work that’s moved beyond it, in Healy’s case toward a sort of oblique slice of All-American narrative. It’s such a strong installation.

While Crystal Schenk’s crystal-encrusted longhorn skull is lovely, its mounting on wood paneling made it feel too winkingly NW kitsch and deterred its ability to jab at Damien Hurst’s absurdly over the top diamond-encrusted human skull. Her “Have and Have Not” fares better, an extraordinarily crafted grocery cart with turned wood handle and stained glass sides quietly referencing the church of consumerism of the most privileged among us in the transportation tool of necessity of the least.

The more I see of David Corbett’s exploration of complex if improvised structures the more I like it. Here there are three works on paper and a sculpture, two and three-dimensional representations in transparent ochre and dripping glossy black respectively of something like a Buckminster Fuller dome folded in on itself once and again, an irregular, tangled armature of a failing polyhedron or a ridiculously complex model of an unknown molecule. The works on paper, “Glass Houses I-III” are forms floating free of context. The thick and dripping coating of the sculpture, “Past Craft,” anchors that form in the real and messy world.

Bruce Conkle and Marne Lucas’ “Warlord Sun King” is a blinding tanning bed studded with plants and garbage, suspended from the ceiling and dangling various minerals and stones like a monster chandelier gone to pot. Conkle and Lucas invoke the decadent style of the court of Louis XIV (tanning bed >> Sun King)—a kind of grotesque Hall of Mirrors reflecting the recent financial bubble that made wealthy art stars—but with a DIY aesthetic: panels of used tinfoil, a very handmade golden shovel, and gold thrift store frames. In the frames the natural world (also busy retaking the chandelier) is pristine but deformed in a stand of burled tree trunks and boxed in glass in natural history museum diorama. Meanwhile there’s a portrait of Lucas in repose holding a framed photo of Conkle, le roi et la renne a la fin de civilization as we know it?

Review: yesterday. Yellow

Avantika Bawa. yesterday, Yellow. installation view.

Funny how caution tape, and the smiley face share that same bright, sunny yellow. It’s a hot rod color, a daisy color, and the color of French’s mustard. And in yesterday. Yellow, Avantika Bawa’s installation at Milepost 5 where she is currently artist in residence, every element in the piece is awash in the hue. Bawa deftly uses yellow to displace the found objects she assembled for the piece from the NE 82nd neighborhood surrounding Milepost 5. These materials are those for building, carrying, or storing; not consumer goods but objects that are meant to be used to do something else. Here, most wait in a glorified state of the same purgatory from which Bawa plucked them: concrete blocks are lined up on the floor, low crates are stacked just a bit haphazardly, boards and wood scraps are piled on the floor, lean against the window, or trace a corner. The unity of their hue, the visual rhythm of their repetition and line (it’s interesting to consider their edges as a drawing in the space), their orderly disorder or slightly disordered order makes of the static objects a dynamic whole.

Avantika Bawa. yesterday, Yellow. installation view.

Minimalism’s tactics including Andre’s use of the floor, McCracken’s leaning planks, and the widespread use of seriality are reinvigorated in the project of casting a critical eye on the life (and death and rebirth) of the manufactured good and what it says about where we are and where we’re going…something that Bawa here casts in a hopeful light, a bright yellow one, not least because in the opposite corner of the space, tucked into the corner, it appears that building anew has begun.

Avantika Bawa. yesterday, Yellow. installation view.

Sayre Gomez: Self Expression

This week, Fourteen30 Contemporary (1430 SE 3rd Avenue) opens Self Expression, a show of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Sayre Gomez.

There’s a reception, this Friday, March 19, 6–9 PM and the show’s open through May 1.

“Sayre Gomez creates installations, drawings, and collages that address the most basic formal instincts of art making, born from a practice in which process/form and content are equally important. Gomez had his most recent solo exhibition (2nd Cannons, Los Angeles) in 2009. And Self Expression will also act as the title of the artist’s forthcoming exhibition at Kavi Kupta Gallery in Berlin.”

Toshiko Okanoue: Drop of Dreams

Toshiko Okanoue, Noon Song, 1954. Photolithographic collage.

Photocollage rising…witness Jonah Freeman’s oversized, intricately cut wonders at Reed during Reed Arts Week, Josh Pavlacky’s contained, manipulated/layered landscapes at Igloo, and Eva Lake’s upcoming show at Augen. We haven’t seen this much photocollage since Reed College’s Cooley Gallery hosted a Jess retrospective in 2008. Opening today at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art (134 NW 8th Avenue) is Drop of Dreams, a show of original surrealist photolithographic collages from the early 1950s by the Japanese artist, Toshiko Okanoue.

From the gallery:

“Okanoue’s collages, created when she was in her mid-20s in post-war Japan, were constructed largely from American picture magazines such as Life and Vogue. Mining these rich visual sources of American popular culture, Okanoue’s beautiful surrealist imagery expresses the dreams of a young female artist in Japan standing at the crossroads of events and movements of enormous historic significance.

“Her work was widely shown and published at the time, and since being rediscovered in the late 1990s, Okanoue’s collages have been exhibited and collected widely by major museums in both Japan and the United States. There are very few examples left in private hands, this exhibition presents some excellent pieces that have until recently been retained by the artist.”

There will be an opening reception on First Thursday, April 1, 5:30—8:30 PM.

Donald Judd: Delegated Fabrication

In November of 1974, in a space a couple floors above where Backspace is today in Old Town, a crew of volunteers built a plywood installation, a Donald Judd, from a drawing by the artist. Paul Sutinen, Co-Chair of the Art Department and Director of Arts Programs at Marylhurst University, vividly remembers crawling around in the u-shaped box that hugged three walls of what was then the Portland Center for the Visual Arts’ (PCVA) expansive space, screwing the sheets of plywood together from the inside.

It was just one of the important installations and exhibitions that PCVA staged in the 70s and 80s. Carl Andre, Sol Lewitt, Daniel Buren, Richard Serra, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Alice Aycock, Robert Irwin, Bruce Nauman, James Turrell, Frank Stella, and Vito Acconci all came to town. Lucy Lippard curated a NW survey show. Allan Kaprow did “Routine” here. The audience for Chuck Close was SRO. And that’s not to mention dance by choreographers like Yvonne Rainer.

On Sunday, April 25, 2010, Portland’s arts community has another opportunity to consider the Donald Judd installation and the larger issues it raises about Judd’s work and its fabrication at Donald Judd: Delegated Fabrication, a one-day conference with Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale School of Art and longtime Judd fabricator Peter Ballantine at the University of Oregon in Portland, White Stag Block (70 NW Couch Street).

An exhibition of original documents—invoices, drawings, correspondence, all from Ballantine’s private collection—trace how Judd’s work went from sketch to fabrication. In a second black box, there will be films about Judd.

I talked to Conference Director and Portland-based artist/writer Arcy Douglass, who organized the conference with Peter Ballantine.

What was the initial impetus for the conference?

When writing about Judd’s installation at Portland Center for the Visual Arts for a piece called Looking at Donald Judd, I got to thinking about how no one had really talked about how Judd’s work got made. To me, as an ex-architect, it seems like a fundamental question: how does it go from Judd’s initial idea to finished piece? The Judd Foundation put me in touch with Peter Ballantine, Judd’s fabricator for over 25 years. I met with him in New York to interview him. After two days and eight hours of conversation, Ballantine said, “This is not an interview, it’s a conference.”

There are two fundamental issues. One, the piece in Portland was fantastic, an example of all PCVA was doing so well. And two, considering Judd is a very famous American artist, no one is talking about some of the core issues at center of his work.

I know there were other Judd plywood installations, Portland wasn’t the first was it? Was the first in Germany?

Germany was later. The first were in London at the Lisson Gallery, I believe in January 1974. PCVA was the third piece.

Peter feels like built-in plywood pieces are really some of Judd’s most radical work. He’ll talk about the family of plywood works, how it fits in with rest of Judd’s work.

What is Robert Storr going to be talking about?

Robert will talk about why this is all still important in a contemporary context. And Bruce Guenther [Chief Curator at the Portland Art Museum] will give an introduction to Judd’s work, to PCVA and the installation at PCVA.

[I tell him about talking to Sutinen.] I don’t remember Paul talking about Ballantine being here for the install. I know Judd wasn’t.

No, and Mary [Beebe, director of PCVA] had to scramble to get money to pay for it. She couldn’t raise money to pay for plywood. Finally, she negotiated with Stimson Lumber to borrow plywood. Afterward, they returned it and Stimson sold it as, “slightly used.”

Peter says whenever he talks about the conference he gets two questions.
1. why hasn’t this been done before? and
2. why isn’t this happening in New York?

***

Follow Arcy’s blog about the conference at juddconference.posterous.com. Already he has put together a Judd reading list. Registration is $65 for early registration by March 22, $85 after and $35 for students.

image via: juddfoundation.org